You may not be able to see them from standing outside and looking up in the sky - but there is literally tonnes and tonnes of 'space junk' floating around just outside the Earth's atmosphere.

Russia has announced they are planning on spending $2 billion on a craft to clean up around 600 pieces of the space junk.

Space Daily reported that Russia's NASA equivalent Energia plans to build a pod that will float through orbit for 15 years, collecting the old satellites and then head back to Earth. The pod will be nuclear-powered and should be completed by 2020 and set to be fully-operational by 2023 if it all goes to plan.